Hey Rack people, I recently acquired (three hours ago) a Nectar Panorama P1 Midi control surface. I was looking for something that I could use to control my DAW (Reaper) and also have lots of cc knobs to control VCV. I have to say, this thing is performing better than I had expected.
As a DAW controller, it’s been great so far. Nectar has support software for most of the major DAW’s, (that I can think of), and it really works as advertised. Once VCV v1 is out, it’ll even be able to control the VSTi within the DAW of your choice. They have a bunch of vst maps available to download, but I was surprised that it mapped some of my other vst’s right away, (although I will have to map those to my liking).
As a VCV midi controller, I now have 16 knobs and nine faders that I’ve been able to map to my Racks. It controls VCV in a similar way that the BeatStep Pro, (thanks for that one Omri), does with it’s Control Mode. The transport buttons have been working to start and stop clocks and sequences. For some reason, the mute buttons on the Nectar don’t send the correct signal to the cf mono plugins to activate ‘solo’ or ‘on’ (I really know nothing about Midi signals, sorry).
I do have some hardware complaints though. Twenty of the buttons aren’t backlit with LED’s. You’ll need a well lit working environment to see what your trying to press. The knobs and faders are just OK, not horrible, not great. Also, good luck finding usage tutorials, (My best hope is that Omri decides that he needs one of these)!
So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with my purchase. It’s $299us new, but I won an Ebay auction for $175 used. I would have been happy, had I payed for a new one though.
I don’t know anything about the Panorama P4 or P6, other than that P1 is essentially just the control surface removed from those keyboards.